David Olney, a gifted Nashville singer and songwriter who was never as well-known as he should have been, died Saturday of an apparent heart attack while performing in Santa Rosa Beach, Fla. He was 71.
Olney was an imaginative writer with a poetic touch. A native of Rhode Island, he moved to Nashville in 1973, where he fell in with the songwriter crowd that included Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle, among others. After releasing a pair of albums with his rock band the X-Rays in the early ’80s, he started a solo career in 1986 that yielded more than two dozen albums. Artists including Emmylou Harris, Linda Rondstadt and Del McCoury recorded his songs, but his best interpretations were his own.
I first heard him in 2001 at the Green River Festival in Greenfield, Mass., where he was part of a songwriting clinic with Sonny Landreth and Corey Harris. After Landreth played some dazzling slide-guitar tune, Olney said in his low-key way, “I feel like I’m trying to play with boxing gloves on.” If he didn’t measure up to Landreth as a guitar player (and really, who does?), Olney more than held his own as a songwriter. I don’t remember everything he played that day, but two songs stand out.
He did “If It Wasn’t for the Wind,” a tune with minimalist muted single-string guitar strumming, and maximum lyrical devastation as Olney transcended the boundaries of love songs for emotional territory that is more rugged and less settled: “If it wasn’t for the rain I wouldn’t know how to feel / If it wasn’t for your touch I wouldn’t know that I was real / If I wasn’t real I’d be a stranger to pain / I wouldn’t know how it feels if it wasn’t for the rain.”
Olney also played “Women Across the River,” a song that verges on profound as he contrasts an undeveloped culture with the alleged progress of our own, and suggests that we’ve been thinking about things all wrong: “Now we have learned to build / Out of concrete, out of steel / And our buildings last a thousands years but then / Even they are bound to fall / The women across the river / Never learned to build a wall.”
It was a decade before I saw him again, in 2011 at Cafe Nine. I’m pretty sure his set didn’t include a single song I knew, and I was transfixed all the same. He simply had that power as a songwriter, which he demonstrated over the years by writing songs from the perspective of the iceberg that sank the Titanic, the donkey that Jesus Christ rode into Jerusalem and a French prostitute during World War I. Olney’s most recent album, 2018’s “This Side or the Other,” was about walls, both physical and metaphorical, intended as a response to political bloviating about the importance of building walls. As befit Olney, his take was more smarter, more incisive and, of course, more humane. He will be missed.